In this morning’s session, Barbara Rolls, PhD presented info about veggie eating from her study with pre-school children. She and her research team made changes to the kids’ normal lunches so they contained more vegetables and fruits and fewer calorie-dense foods.

The question – would they increase their veggies and fruits and would they eat more food overall to make up for fewer calories at lunch? The answer is “yes” to more veggies and fruits and “no” to eating more later in the day to increase their calories.

How to get children to eat their veggies? The successful method in this case may be that they served them veggies first – carrot sticks or tomato soup – before they received other foods.

Studies have shown the same ideas work for adults as well. A simple, easy to implement idea!

At last night’s poster session, we caught up with Dr. Laura P. Hale of Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Hale’s using an AICR grant to study bromelain, a combination of enzymes found in the stems of pineapples. Specifically, she’s adding fresh pineapple juice to mouse diets to test its effect on the kind of inflammation that has been linked to colon cancer.